RAID 1 and recovery

[Jeffrey Ross]

James Thorpe wrote:
> Hi List,
>
> Been searching for a while for an answer to this, and have started 
> experimenting with a fresh install, but not found a way yet.  
> Basically I'm building a small home server, primarily to act as a file 
> store.  It's got a drive for the OS, and 2 further drives which I wish 
> to set up in a RAID 1 array to use for the store.  All the info I've 
> managed to find so far to do with recovery from this is when just a 
> drive in the array fails, however I'm also concerned about the box as 
> a whole, and I'd like to know if it's possible to take a single drive 
> from the array, put it into another machine and be able to read from 
> it?  Eg just as a normal ext3 partition etc?
>
> That's it... very simple - but I've not found the answer yet!
>

Yes you can and I've done it, however I'd recommend letting it be 
mounted as a RAID volume.  I have run into the problem where I purposely 
removed one of the volumes on a RAID 1 system (the one that was the 
actual boot drive) only to find out that the bootloader wasn't properly 
installed and that the second disk although it contained the RAID 
mirror, it was not set to active and couldn't be mounted. 

As I recall (while sweating bullets) I booted the rescue CD and enabled 
each of the RAID volumes one by one.  Unfortunately I don't remember the 
options from mdadm or I'd give them to you.
> Thanks,
> James.
>
Your welcome...

Jeff